Lamp for colored light treatment



Aug, 23, 1938. a. E. KOTHE LAMP FOR COLORED LIGHT TREATMENT Filed Sept. 5, 1932 h I INVENTOR {I Z EH11.

AM- ATTORNEY could be treated at one time.

Patented Aug. 23, 1938 UNITED STATES I w t PATENT :"o-FFi-cE 2,127,604 LAMP FOR COLORED 'IJIGHT'TREKTMENT Gertrude E. Kothe, New York, y

Application September 3, 1932, Serial No? 631,676

1 Claim. (01,128 29 v I A cabled! passing through an aperture in the This invention relates to lamps for colored light treatment, to be employed in beauty, therapeutic and other similar treatments. Treatment by colored light has been practiced for a long time but the lamps used have been unsatisfactory for various reasons. One of the chief defects of such lamps was that they were constructed so that only a small part of the body Another defect was that the radiation given off by such lamps was concentrated to such an extent that great care was necessary to avoid burning or otherwise injuring the skin of the person treated.

The present invention aims to provide an improved lamp which will deliver well distributed light of the desired color over the entire upper part of the head, and which is convenient to use and efiicient in operation, and has other advantages which will appear from the following description.

To these ends the invention consists in the features of construction, arrangement and combination of parts hereinafter described and illustrated in the drawing and specifically pointed out in the claim.

One approved embodiment of the invention is illustrated, by way of example, in the accompanying drawing, wherein Fig. 1 is a vertical, central section through a lamp designed to treat the upper part of the head;

Fig. 2 is a side elevation of the lower part of the lamp with the light screen partially separated from the lamp housing;

Fig. 3 is a bottom plan view of the lamp; and

Fig. 4 is a detail section on the line 44 of Fig. 3. I

The lamp shown comprises three main parts, a housing I 1, a reflector H which carries the electric light bulbs l2, and a color screen generally designated as E3. The housing and the reflector have substantially hemispherical top portions, and the top of the housing is spaced away from the top of the reflector. The housing serves a double function. In the first place, by being spaced apart from the reflector, except around the lower part thereof, it provides a heatinsulating air space around the hot upper part of the reflector. Air-holes M are provided in the top of the housing to permit the escape of heated air. In the second place, it serves to conceal the lamp supports l5 on the top of the reflector. A handle H5 is attached to the housing to enable the lamp to be readily moved or, if desired, suspended from any convenient support.

housing supplies "current to the lamps. The color screen l3 issubstantially hemispherical inform, its radius being somewhat greater than that of the average head, so that the lamp tween the top of the screen and the top of the reflector is usually about half the width of the reflector at its widest part, and should, except in exceptional cases, be in excess of one-third of such width. The reason for this construction is that the top of the screen receives a greater proportion of light per unit area direct from the lamps than do the sides. of the screen further from the lamps than the top, but also the direct rays from the lamps strike the sides at an increasingly oblique angle and do not even strike the lowermost part of the screen at all. Both of these factors reduce the light per unit area received direct from the lamps by the sides of the screen. To compensate, in part at least, for these differences in the amount of direct light, the reflector is designed,

as above described, so as to direct a large proportion of the reflected light on the sides of the screen. The inner surface of the reflector is desirably slightly corrugated, as shown, to increase the dispersion of the light from the lamps.

If a single source of light were used, the light rays would, even with the construction above described, tend to be concentrated more than is desirable in a certain zone or zones. Therefore, to obtain better and more uniform distribution of the light, a plurality of spaced sources of light, such as the three lamps 12, are used. The location of the lamps, or at least some of the lamps, off center with respect to the reflector also aids in throwing a larger proportion of light on the sides of the screen than would otherwise be the r case.

The color screen as shown comprises two annular frames 25 and 26, hingedly connected at 21, and two hemispheres 28 and 29 of wire mesh, one carried by each of the frames 25 and 26, between Not only are the sides h which a sheet 32 of colored gelatin, Cellophane or the like is held. The sheet 32 is positioned by swinging the frames away from each other and placing the sheet over the wire-mesh hemisphere 29, and then swinging the frames with their wiremesh hemispheres together into the position shown in Fig. 1. The colored sheet 32 is thereby deformed into hemispherical shape and held in such shape by the wire mesh hemispheres. If at any time a difierent colored screen is required, the frames are separated and the sheet therebetween replaced by a sheet of the desired color. The frames are releasably held together by spring clips 33 as shown in Fig. 4.

The screen as a whole is releasably attached to the bottom of the housing by a pair of upstanding slotted spring clips 35 mounted on the frame 25 adapted to engage wedge-shaped projections 31 on the lower part of the housing.

In the use of the invention, the lamp is placed over the head of the person to be treated, as shown by Fig. 1, the lamp being held so that the color screen 13 is spaced away from the head so that because of the size of the screen recess air may circulate and carry off some of the heat from the lamp. The light from the light bulbs I2 is directed by the reflector l 1 against the color screen so that the desired rays of colored light from the screen will be projected directly against all parts of the persons head within the screen.

What is claimed is: 1

A lamp for colored light treatment, comprising a curved top reflector having a substantially hemispherical top portion and a lower substantially cylindrical portion, a source of light in the upper part of the reflector, a color screen for receiving and transmitting light from the reflector comprising two wire-mesh members of similarly upwardly curved cross-section separably connected together and a sheet of colored translucent material between said wire-mesh members and deformed by the latter into correspondingly curved form, and means for detachably securing the color screen in position, said wire mesh members and curved translucent material being located within the lower cylindrical portion of the reflector and being of sufficient size to receive completely the upper part of the head of a person so that rays of colored light will be directed downwardly upon the head by the top portion of the reflector and inwardly entirely around the head by the lower portion of the reflector.

GERTRUDE E. KOTHE 

